by Judith Tarr
The young charioteer had reined his team to a halt, turning them, whipping them on. Kemni leaped aside, fell and rolled, landed somehow on his feet and within reach of the chariot as it flew past. He leaped as he had once before, saw the chariot pass, knew a moment’s sinking despair before he half fell, half staggered into the lurching, rattling thing.
The child kicked at him. He stumbled against the chariot’s rim.
The child pulled hard on the rein. The chariot veered.
Kemni staggered again, but forward, into greater safety. For a breath’s span he had his balance. He snatched, heaved, thrust the child out; and seized the reins just before they snapped loose.
These long-eared creatures were little like the soft-mouthed horses he had driven under Ariana’s tutelage. Their mouths were like forged bronze. He cursed and hauled them about, with a briefly chagrined reflection that he, a man grown, could barely master them, and that infant had driven them as easily as if they had been made of air.
But they yielded to him at last, and consented grudgingly to turn. The battle was over. All but one of the guards were down. The two chariots stood still, with Kemni’s men at the asses’ heads. Iphikleia stood in one, kilted like a man of Crete, and no mantle to be seen.
It was the sight of her, perhaps, that had astonished the Retenu into immobility. She was a wild beauty, with her black hair streaming over her white breasts, holding her team still with effortless strength.
Kemni muscled his own pair of long-eared demons to a halt beside her. The former passengers lay on the ground, with Kemni’s men standing over them, and a spearpoint resting lightly on each throat.
He had seen them both in the workshop. But the one who had seemed to command them stood in the third chariot. As far as Kemni could see on a face bearded to the eyes, he was deeply affronted and not even slightly afraid. “Take your hands off my bridle,” he said to the man who held his team’s heads.
Gebu smiled at him, sweetly insolent. He did not speak the language of the Retenu—he would not stoop to it—but the tone was clear enough.
This foreigner bridled at the smile, which was indeed provoking. It was the smile of a prince in the face of an upstart underling—and such a prince, filthy, unshaven, and dressed in a scrap of rag. “Bandits! You—slave. Tell them to take that pack-donkey yonder, and let us go.”
The slave he spoke to was Seti, standing amid the scared huddle of servants, surrounded by half-naked and ill-shaven men with bright and well-kept weapons. Seti was as cool as Kemni had always seen him, as well he might be; he had nothing to fear from these brigands.
He did, it was clear, understand what the foreigner had said. “Tell them yourself,” he drawled with wonderful insolence.
The foreigner sucked in a breath of pure outrage. Kemni intervened before he could collapse in an apoplexy; he was, after all, the whole cause and purpose of this venture. “I thank you,” he said in that guttural tongue. His own command of it was rough, but it was serviceable. “We’ll take the donkey—along with the rest.”
“Just the donkey,” the foreigner said, pivoting to face him, speaking slowly as if to an idiot child. “Just one donkey. We take the rest. We belong to the king; we go to him in his city. These are the king’s donkeys.”
“Are they now?” Kemni smiled as sweetly as Gebu had. “Better and better.”
He tilted his chin at his men who were waiting. They were delighted to oblige: falling on the foreigner and his mute, staring charioteer, plucking them from the chariot and binding them and stringing them together on a lead, like a train of asses in a caravan.
Kemni disliked to abandon the chariots and their trained teams, but they could not escape on the road. As difficult as it would be to row and sail upriver against that powerful current, they must do that. And there was no room in the boat for chariots. Nor, for the matter of that, for as many men as they had captured.
The three from the workshop, they must keep. “Kill the rest,” Seti said. Kemni raised a brow. “Were they as irritating as that?”
“Somewhat,” Seti said. “You can’t let them live. They’ll run straight to the nearest foreign lord and set him after us.”
“I don’t think so,” Kemni said. He went to stand over the servants where they had been ordered to sit, all of them huddled together, watching him with wide, frightened eyes. “Listen to me,” he said. “We’re going to leave you here and vanish. We’ll bind you and strip you, as if we were bandits. But we won’t kill you—if you promise one thing.”
They stared at him. Not one seemed possessed of wits enough to speak. “Promise me,” Kemni said, “that you will tell those who found you that bandits ambushed your caravan, killed your masters, and made off with their possessions.”
“That isn’t the truth?” one of them asked.
“It’s what you’ll tell anyone who asks,” said Kemni.
They all nodded vigorously. Kemni eyed them in some doubt still. Slaves would say whatever they thought their masters wanted them to say. But he had taken precautions. None of them had seen the boat, or could know of it. If they told their tale of bandits, men would scour the hills in search of men afoot or in chariots—and never think to look for a boatful of fishermen on the river.
But for that to succeed, the chariots and the caravan must be disposed of. If someone could lay a trail that led into the desert.
Kemni had decided almost before he paused to think. They had thought to capture and abduct a single man, not three of them—four; Gebu had caught and held the young charioteer, who was calling his passenger Father. A son?
A hostage. Even as Kemni formed the thought, Gebu acted on it. He laid the flat of his knifeblade against the child’s throat, and said to the eldest and tallest of the Retenu, “Come with us. Or he dies.”
In whatever language either of them spoke, the gesture and the tone were unmistakable. The foreigner’s face darkened. He nodded sharply.
Gebu smiled. “Thank you so kindly,” he said. He handed child and knife to the man who stood nearest—who happened to be a deeply contented Seti—and as easily, as effortlessly as a prince could do, set about ordering the retreat into the reeds. “And as for the chariots—” he began.
Kemni spoke before he could go on. “I’ll take them up into the hills.”
“But—” said Gebu.
“If we leave them, people will look for us. If we shatter them and sink them in the river, there are still the beasts to think of. They’ll make their way home if they can. I can take them far away, far enough that when they do return, it will be too late to betray you.”
“And then how will you go home?” Gebu demanded. “No, no; best we sink them with the chariots. By the time the flood brings them up, if it does, we’ll be long gone.”
“There’s no time to do all that,” Kemni said. “It’s only the gods’ good fortune that no one’s come down the road since we began. Go quickly, my lord. Take these men back to the Bull of Re. I’ll come when I can, or send word if I can’t.”
Gebu’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, will you? What are you plotting, O my brother?”
“O my prince,” said Kemni, “I’m plotting nothing but to rid us of these chariots, and to go back home as I can.”
“By way, perhaps, of Avaris?” Iphikleia inquired.
Kemni shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll go where I’m moved to go, and listen, and watch, and see what there is to see. If the Upper Kingdom is ready to cast off its yoke—then so much the better for my king.”
“Brother,” said Gebu, “there is no need for you to—”
“I know,” said Kemni, “that your father is not altogether cut off from this kingdom. But a man known to him, trusted by him, admitted to his lesser councils—how many of these are here?”
“What will you do, then? Raise a rebellion?”
“I might try,” Kemni said.
Gebu shook his head. “No. You’ll get killed.”
“We’ll get killed if we wrangle here. Go, my lord. I�
��ll come when I can.” Kemni braced to fight again, but his ears had caught what he looked for long before now: the sound of feet on the road. He sprang into the chariot that was nearest, and scrambled up the reins. One of the men tossed him the rope that bound the packbeasts in their long string. He looked with despair on the second chariot. If he could fasten that somehow to the packbeasts’ string . . .
Iphikleia sprang into it. “Go,” she said. “Go!”
Kemni bit his tongue and wound the lead about a post in the chariot’s rim, and whipped up the team. They responded with admirable speed. The packtrain, by the gods’ blessing, saw fit to follow.
They had to cling to the road for some distance. Something flew at Kemni. He ducked. It thudded into the chariot. A—robe? And one of the tall hats that Retenu sometimes wore. He had no beard to go with them, but from a distance, he might pass for a beardless boy. He struggled into the robe, which reeked heavily of old wool and new sweat, and pulled the hat down over his ears.
Iphikleia, behind him, was likewise clothed. If he looked as outlandish as she did, then all their stratagem was of no use.
But no one met them. The passers behind were all on foot, except for one with an ox: farmers and men of the villages, carefully oblivious to the Retenu ahead of them. Gebu and the rest were gone, vanished in the reeds. Kemni prayed to any god who would listen, to keep them safe and bring them back whole to the Bull of Re.
An almost unconscionable distance from the thicket of reeds, the road begot a side way, narrow and rather steep but not impossible for a chariot. Or so Kemni hoped. He urged the team up it. The packtrain scrambled after, and Iphikleia in their wake.
It was brutal going for a chariot, but too narrow and steep to turn back. With every bruising jolt, Kemni prayed that wheels and axle would hold. The team strained, slipping and scrambling, but kept their footing by some miracle of the gods.
The track narrowed even further, and seemed minded to shoot straight up the cliff. But just as he had despaired, when he knew there was nowhere to go—up, down, sidewise, into the sun-shot air—the track breasted the summit and came out on a long level.
Kemni stopped there, content simply to breathe. The packtrain stood with heads hanging, till first one and then another bethought itself to nibble the thorny scrub that dotted the plain.
There was a skin of water in the chariot, and a bag that proved to hold bread, cheese, a packet of dates. The packbeasts were laden with more water, more food, and a gathering of varied riches: tents, bedding, a whole packful of robes and linen tunics.
Iphikleia seemed in better state than Kemni: fresher, and less whitely terrified. “We should go farther,” she said. “A day’s journey. More if we can. If we can find a place with ample grazing, the herd might not leave it for days.”
“I had been thinking that,” he said. “It’s been too many years since I was in this country, but as I remember it, there is such a place at not too great a distance. If we’re not fallen on by bandits, we’ll come to it in a day or two.”
She nodded. She had sipped from a waterskin in her own chariot, but laid it thriftily away after two brief swallows.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. He had not meant to say it; he knew it was futile. But it slipped out.
She took no notice of it. She had set her team in motion once more. Up so high and so far from the road, they had no need to run. In a while they would quicken their pace. Now, they walked, chariots and packbeasts, across that high and barren level. No living thing stirred upon it save a vulture circling high against the sun. The heat was stunning, staggering—wonderful. Kemni stripped off the reeking foreign robe and cast the hat on top of it on the chariot’s floor. Soon, if he was wise, he would put on robes and a mantle from the pack of garments. But for a while he reveled in the force of light and heat on his bare shoulders.
Iphikleia had wrapped herself in her ragged mantle once more, swathed like a desert tribesman; and well she might be, with that milk-fair skin. She was not a child of the sun as he was. The sea was her father, and a cold and distant island her mother.
She endured this that must have been as hot to her as a forge, silent and uncomplaining. If he had been a god he would have sent her winging back to the Labyrinth, to those cool airy halls and those blinding white walls, and everywhere the horns of the Bull that were also the horns of the moon.
But he was only mortal, and this was his own country, his Egypt; his Lower Kingdom. The pace he set was swift but not so swift as to exhaust the beasts. He had no desire to kill them; simply to lose them for a while, till Gebu was safe with the prisoners, far away in the Upper Kingdom.
Lose them therefore he did, riding toward the slowly sinking sun, across the barren land and the bare land, the Red Land that was like a sea of stone, endless and waterless. When dark came, they made camp, spreading rugs and fleeces under the stars. The tent they left in its pack, but they brought out a small feast, and likewise the bedding, and a jar of wine fit for a king.
There was even water to wash in, if they were profligate. Kemni washed off the worst of the dust and river mud, and felt almost clean for the first time since he had left the Bull of Re. He ate in great comfort, drank sparingly of the wine.
Iphikleia was silent—had not said a word, now he stopped to think, since the morning. She did not seem ill. He took her in his arms to be certain. She came without resistance. Her skin was cool, her brow unfevered. She warmed for him, and quickly too.
There under the stars, far away from any human thing, protected by firelight and starlight and Kemni’s prayers to the gods of earth and sky, they danced the oldest dance of all. They danced the stars into dawn, and the sun into the sky. And when it was morning again, they went on, westward and ever westward, till memory of green and scent of water were gone.
VIII
When Kemni had almost despaired, when he was certain that he had lost them beyond hope, the line of hills struck his memory. There, two close together like plump sisters, and a long slope of sand and scree, and wonder of all wonders, a glimmer of green. The spring that he remembered was there where the two hills met, pure water bubbling from the rock. It trickled into a pool, overflowed and tumbled down a narrow headlong bed into an oasis in the desert.
It was, if one were honest, a poor and barren place; but in this wilderness it was rich. It had water; grass, sere now and dry but ample for the beasts; and even a bit of shelter, an overhang of rock that was not quite deep enough to call itself a cave.
They turned the beasts loose there and let them graze on the yellowed grass. The packs and chariots they hid under the rock, all but the little that they would take: food, clothing, water for the journey. It would be a long way back afoot, long and perilous.
Before they embarked on it, they rested. A day; two. Three. There was no time here, no urgency; no press of the world and its troubles. They were out of the world, and out of time, as if they had been taken away beyond the horizon into the land of the dead.
And yet they were still vividly and fiercely alive. Kemni rose from proving it, the third morning—and never mind what it did to his body to be so suddenly deprived of its pleasure. “We have to go,” he said.
She did not frown or stiffen or protest. She rose, much more steadily than he had, and washed in the stream, and put on the robes that she had set aside days since. Then, while Kemni scrambled belatedly to follow suit, she set her pack at her feet and waited.
He would hate her, when he had leisure. Three days’ bliss, and she conducted herself as if they had never been.
That was Iphikleia. He could let it drive him mad, or he could suffer it, since there was no changing it. With a faint sigh he shouldered his own pack. “It’s a long walk,” he said. “Shall we begin?”
~~~
Long indeed, and dry, and burning hot in the day, but icy cold at night. They traveled in the almost-cool of the mornings and in the somewhat lessened heat of the evenings, and rested in the middle. Their water dwindled. Ke
mni found his way to one of the oases that he remembered from a campaign long ago. It was still there, the well still good. They drank deep and long, and slept well after a livelier loving than either had looked for when they stumbled parched and spent into the oasis.
Kemni woke with a small start. He had gone to sleep in the shade of the oasis’ palms, with his mantle over him to block out the harsh light of noon, and Iphikleia in his arms. It was daylight still, but softer, the sun hovering low. The heat was breathless, and the air utterly still. Iphikleia slept at a little distance in a tumble of dusty black hair, creamy bare shoulder, ragged brown mantle.
Wind there was none, but there was ample stirring in that green and pleasant place. Asses—a whole herd of them. For a dazed moment he knew they had followed him from that hidden place to the westward. But none of them had had caparisons like this, or been attended by bearded men in embroidered robes.
It was a caravan, and not a small one, either. Packbeasts, chariot teams, men afoot and in chariots—it could have been an army, so large was it, and so well armed. It was coming from Nubia, perhaps—the Retenu traded with that nation, the better to discomfit the king in Thebes. There were great tusks of ivory bound to some of the packs, with armed men on guard. And in those chests and boxes might be gold, or ebony, or spices.
They had not seen Kemni or his companion, or else had reckoned them of no account. The place Kemni and Iphikleia had chosen was somewhat away from the well, up a slope, in a grove of date-palms. Unless someone had a fancy for green fruit, he was hardly likely to trouble himself with either the place or its occupants.
So Kemni told himself. Two people alone, with no visible weapons, would be little threat to such a caravan. If they were bait for a trap, he doubted the caravaneers would be greatly concerned. It would take an army to capture this caravan.
They seemed intent on making camp, ordering their ranks, securing their defenses. The beasts were strung together in lines, the chariots set in the middle like a wall around the heaps of baggage, with men on guard, armed and watchful. Kemni would have divided those mounds of treasure and scattered them a bit, rather than gather them all together for the ease and comfort of robbers who might fall on the caravan, but he was only a soldier. He knew little of managing caravans.
